Since 1925, the SCSU Alumni Association has been the heart of Owl Nation – supporting students, strengthening the community, and leading with purpose. On October 3, members of the Owl family are invited to come together for a once-in-a-century gathering on Homecoming Eve: the SCSU Alumni Awards Celebration, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the SCSU Alumni Association. On Friday, October 3, the Alumni Association will celebrate the remarkable alumni whose achievements, leadership, and service have shaped its legacy and inspired generations.
James Barber Distinguished Alumni Award: Mike Arias, ’81
Mike Arias, ’81, is the founding and managing partner of Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Torrijos LLP. He is the 2018 president of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA) and president-elect of the Consumer Attorneys Association of California (CAOC). During his 35-year career, he has litigated and tried matters throughout the United States, in both state and federal courts. He has served as lead, co-lead, or liaison counsel in well over 100 class and mass tort actions. His trial experience is as diverse as the firm’s practice. His last 10 trials have included serious personal injury, wrongful death, employment, consumer class actions, and mass wage and hour claims. He has recently resolved several class actions and multiple plaintiff matters involving antitrust, toxic torts, consumer, wage and hour, environmental issues, and product liability. During his career, he has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for the firm’s clients.
Arias is a member of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) and was selected as a 2018 California Top Plaintiff Lawyer by the Daily Journal. He is admitted to practice law in California, New York, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia. He has also been admitted before numerous federal courts throughout the country. He holds an “AV” rating by Martindale-Hubbell. The “AV” rating is the highest rating given and is awarded only upon reaching “heights” of professional excellence, both in terms of legal ability and ethical standards. He has also been selected annually as a Southern California Super Lawyer, an honor reserved for the top 5% of attorneys practicing in Southern California.
Arias has been certified as an agent with the National Basketball Players’ Association, Major League Baseball Players’ Association, and National Football League Players’ Association and has negotiated millions of dollars in contracts for dozens of professional athletes.
Dorothy Martino Alumni Appreciation Award:
Per and Astrid Heidenreich Family Foundation
The Per and Astrid Heidenreich Family Foundation, formed in 2005 and based in Greenwich, Conn., is committed to improving lives and reducing inequities of people in the communities of southern Connecticut. The Heidenreich Foundation has made a generous multi-year gift to support Southern undergraduates who major in social work. The funds are used to provide student scholarships, individual mentoring, and professional development. Per and Astrid’s son-in-law Michael Jedlicka – married to their daughter Cecilie – is a Southern alumnus. Michael Chambers is the executive director of the Foundation and co-creator of the Family First in Education program in Greenwich. We congratulate the Heidenreich family on this honor and appreciate the partnership they’ve developed with Southern.
Charlene Hill Riccardi Service Award:
Ruth Eren, ’71, MS, ’84
After graduating from SCSU in 1971, Ruth Eren, ’71, MS, ’84, went on to work for 14 years as a special education administrator in Connecticut public schools. During this time, Eren developed an affinity for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
She returned to Southern in 2002 to teach in the Department of Special Education with the goal of starting a master’s program with a specialty in ASD, because there weren’t comparable programs to train teachers at the time. Hired as an adjunct professor, she was promoted to a full faculty member the following year and eventually chaired the department.
In 2010, along with the late former interim dean of the College of Education, James Granfield, Eren co-created the Center of Excellence on Autism Spectrum Disorders at SCSU. Its mission is to develop and deliver training rooted in evidence-based practices for teachers and others working with children with ASD. She became the center’s first director, a position she held until her retirement.
For many years, Eren consulted with public schools in CT regarding program development for children with ASD. She has been a member of several state committees related to this subject, including Connecticut’s Task Force for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Eren is a noted expert in the field of program development for children. She wrote or co-authored more than 20 papers on various aspects of autism, from examining transdisciplinary training models for teachers to helping individuals with Asperger’s syndrome become independent adults.
In 2015, after a national search, Eren was named the Goodwin Endowed Chair in Special Education, the first (and only) endowed chair in SCSU’s history. The Goodwin Endowed Chair was funded by a gift left by the late Dorothy Weisbauer Goodwin, who graduated from Southern in 1939, when it was the New Haven State Teachers College. Following her retirement as a faculty member in 2017, Eren joined the SCSU Foundation Board of Directors.
Young Alumni Professional Award:
Paul McKee, ’21
Paul McKee, ’21, is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, an executive MBA candidate at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, and a graduate of Duke’s Master in Interdisciplinary Data Science (MIDS) program.
His research—drawing from organizational behavior, social and cognitive psychology, philosophy, and behavioral economics—examines the motivational factors that influence how individuals perceive and navigate the workplace. These forces include moral cognition and the fear of missing out (FoMO). To understand how they influence behavior, decision-making, and the ability to thrive in organizational contexts, he employs a range of methodologies, including behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational modeling. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and has been featured in popular press outlets, including Forbes, Times Higher Education, and Fortune. Additionally, his work has been featured in public messaging from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and WebMD.
He also holds Visiting Researcher affiliations with Stanford and Yale. Additionally, he is an adjunct professor at Southern in the departments of psychology, philosophy, and computer science.
Outside of academia, he has extensive industry experience as the lead machine learning engineer for Patient Preference Predictor, LLC, a start-up with the goal of revolutionizing healthcare for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias (ADRD).
McKee proudly served as an active-duty United States Marine Corps Machine Gunner from 2013 to 2018 as part of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment.
While an undergraduate at SCSU, McKee majored in psychology with minors in biology and data science. Before graduating summa cum laude after completing his degree in three years, he earned many awards, including the Honorary Undergraduate Scholar Award (New England Psychological Association), Academic Excellence in Psychology (SCSU), Dr. James Mazur Research Award (SCSU), Dr. Ed Thompson Award (SCSU), and the Henry Barnard Distinguished Student Award (Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System). Moreover, McKee served as a teaching assistant and peer academic leader, supported fellow veterans through Southern’s Veterans Center, and mentored at-risk youth in the community.
In 2021, reflecting his commitment to this community, he became the first then-active student in the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system to establish and personally endow a scholarship. The $25,000 endowment—lasting in perpetuity—supports many of SCSU’s incredibly gifted but financially insecure students’ engagement in interdisciplinary research and coursework across the Psychology Department and Data Science program.
